“Son, if the roles were reversed, what would you do? If you had to witness your wife being fucked by another man, if you knew she could have prevented it by speaking up a whole year before, if you had to deal with the humiliation of not only seeing it but knowing every single person important to you did as well…”
I swallowed thickly, because I understood where he was coming from. I put myself in those positions, first by ignoring the red flag Fiona threw out last year with her offer. Then, I did it again because Fiona convinced me that Violet was having an affair with my cousin. My reaction to my wife’s strange behavior said enough about how I would have behaved if I’d been in her shoes and seen her with another man. I would not have handled it well. I didn’t handle the implication that she might have stepped out on me well. That’s why we were in this situation to begin with. I knew then that I’d have to do exactly as my dad suggested and give Violet what she wanted, even if it killed me to do so.
"I was drunk off my ass after I just thought I found out my wife was cheating on me with my fucking best friend. My cousin. I didn't mean it…" I tried to defend myself.
"Doesn't really matter what you thought in that moment, as you had no right to those feelings. You should have confirmed things first instead of going off half-cocked."
I sighed because the answer was just as damning as my fucking stupid decisions.
After a long silence, my mom sighed and rested her head on my shoulder. “Your wife had to bring Fiona in on the party planning because she saw her with Moreland more than once while they planned that party for you.” Mom patted my knee and then leaned back and gave me the saddest look. “Violet figured it was the best way to get you to the park without you being suspicious, since you’d most likely have to handle a bit of business early in the day as you normally did before taking the whole night off. Moreland warned Violet about Fiona and how he could see the bad intentions she had. You know what Violet told him?"
I shook my head, feeling sick to my stomach all over again.
"She told him that there was no reason to worry because it didn't matter what that woman said or did, you loved your wife enough to put Fiona in her place if she tried anything, and that you would never let her so much as hint at something inappropriate without there being consequences.”
"Fuck!" I grumbled as I stared down at the divorce papers that seemed to laugh at me. Her signature on them said that I proved her wrong and she was done with me as a result. I couldn't blame her. No matter how much I wanted to fight things, my parents were right. I needed to give her time and space to heal and hopefully miss me. I also needed the time to put my shit in order and work on a plan to get my wife back.
Chapter 13
Violet
I wanted to die.
“Did you hear me?” My eyes shifted to my father’s as he spoke so softly I almost missed the question. I shook my head, despite having heard him the first time.
“He was served this morning. His parents are with him.”
“What…?” I couldn’t get the rest out. I choked on the words. “What did he say?”
“Honey, what could he say? Ridge is as broken up about this as you are. You already know that bitch drugged him, got him drunk on purpose. Raped him,” Dad choked on that last bit and adjusted his collar as if the clothing represented the trapped feeling that word did.
“But he was there with her. He chose to be there, Dad. My husband believed the worst in me and his best friend. That was after he failed to tell me about Fiona’s offer of sex a whole year before. We had the rule in place exactly so something like this could never happen.”
“As much as I want to agree with you, people make mistakes, honey. Ridge’s father genuinely believes his boy thought it was a one-off joke and that’s why he didn’t act.”
“Yeah?” I questioned as the anger I had pushed down in favor of grief finally boiled over and bled into my voice making its way past the crippling sadness. “How did that joke turn out for everyone? For me?”
“I am behind you. Whatever you decide, but I don’t want you to act in haste and then regret your choice. It hasn’t even been a full month yet. You have three weeks to go before a judge will even hear your case. Are you sure you want to go through with this? If he signs those papers, thinking it’s what you want, your marriage may very well come to an end, sweetheart.”
“My marriage ended last year when he chose to keep Fiona’s confidence rather than honor our agreement. I just didn’t know it until now.”
Dad pulled me into his strong arms and held onto me so tightly, it felt like he might be able to push all my shattered pieces back together. The feeling only lasted a moment and then he leaned back to pull his cell phone free of his pocket.
“Your mom is having a difficult time with your brother right now.”
“I’m sorry. She mentioned that he’s acting out because he saw his hero in the worst light.”
My dad offered up a dubious look that said I was both right and wrong all at once. I knew he was having trouble with what Ridge had done, but even in my state of falling apart, I understood that my brother was angry with me, too. He had overheard enough to know that Ridge had been drugged and thought I was being a bitch for not being there for my husband. Drake wasn’t wrong in thinking I was an asshole for not stepping up and standing by my man through that. I felt guilty as hell. Ridge was raped. There was no way to pretty-up those words. That’s what Fiona had done when she offered him drugged liquor and took advantage once he was too out of it to stop her.
It left me with an awful feeling in my gut. There was the part of me that wanted to wrap my arms around my husband and tell him that everything would be okay. I truly did. Then there was the other part who couldn’t get past the fact that none of it had to happen. If he had held true to the promise he made me, that woman would have been out of the company last year. She would have never had access to our lives, to him, and wouldn’t have been able to turn him into a victim.
Doubt crept in as I sat there thinking about how everything played out. My dad was right. I should probably have waited to make the decisions I did. They were all done from a knee-jerk reaction. I was hurt, betrayed, and angry. There were so many levels to what happened that it felt like my head was spinning every time I pulled at a different thread. Ridge thought I was cheating on him. My husband lacked faith in me after he lied to me for a year about his assistant not being a problem. Everything that resulted from that shattered my trust in him.
I didn’t think there was a way to get that back. Everything we had done, planned, and been through felt tainted. How many other times had things like that happened? Maybe not with his direct staff, but some of the artists he had to work with. What if there were more high-profile versions of Fiona waiting in the wings to do the same thing? What if they were staged just right, so they didn’t even have to go to the lengths his assistant did? It wouldn’t take much to set him up now that it had already become a thing. It would make our lives that much harder at a time when I couldn’t trust him to tell me the truth. I didn’t want to live in a relationship where I would always wonder who would blindside me next.
And the one thing I kept going back to was that instead of talking to me when he started to question my loyalty, he went to her. He confided in her.
My husband chose to keep Fiona’s secret from me. Everyone, my brother being at the top of the list, was so focused on the sex act. They all thought that was what I was spun up about. It wasn’t. I was angry on my husband’s behalf about that. I was sick to death that something like that could happen to him. I want to chop every part of her body that touched his without permission and stuff it into a meat grinder and then make her eat it. I have never been a violent person, but that was how I felt about Fiona. She was the worst kind of human, and she should be held accountable for what she did.
